Some time ago a friend of mine saw Aron Ralston speak at a business function. He told me that it was the most inspirational talk he’d ever heard.
Ralston — as everyone knows by now — is the young man who became pinned by a boulder during a misfortunate solo hike and used an all-purpose tool to cut off his right arm below the elbow in order to escape. It was an act of astonishing courage, the kind of thing that prompts normal people to pause in their daily routines when they first hear about it, to reflect for a moment on the human capacity for survival, and to wonder whether we ourselves would have the chops to do what this man did in extremis.
So why did the feature film 127 Hours, which tells this story, fall so flat for me?
